[239] Pliny, N. H., IX. 20, on the say-so of Arist., N. H., VI. 16, “pinguescunt in tantum ut dehiscant.”
[240] Ælian, de nat. an., XIII. 16.
[241] Oppian, hal., III. 285.
[242] Byron’s view of fishing is not favourable—as his lines in Don Juan, Canto XIII. prove:
“Angling, too, that solitary vice, Whatever Isaak Walton says or sings.”
He bore, possibly from failure to catch his boyish Aberdeenshire trout, a grudge against Father Izaak,
“The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.”
Byron closes his note with “But Anglers! No Angler can be a good man.” Walton received many a shrewd blow, especially from his contemporary Richard Franck, whose Northern Memories, with its appreciation of the Fly and its depreciation of Izaak’s ground-bait, found less favour than the Compleat Angler. His worsting of Walton at Stafford runs, “he stop’d his argument and leaves Gesner to defend it: so huff’d a way.” Again, “he stuffs his book with morals from Dubravius—not giving us one precedent of his own experiments, except otherwise when he prefers the trencher to the troling-rod! There are drones that rob the hive, yet flatter the bees that bring them honey.”
[243] Deipn., VIII. 47. Rabelais would seemingly make Aristotle his own Proteus, for Pantagruel (IV. 31) discovers him with his lantern at the bottom of the sea spying about, examining, and writing. This lantern has long been coupled with that of the Sea-urchin, but as a few pages later on we find ourselves in the Pays des Lanternois, it is probably a reference to a philosopher’s lamp, like that of Diogenes.
[244] The Natural History (of which the text I use is Bekker’s) is practically the only work by Aristotle discussed here. For me, being no “Clerk” although “of Oxenford,” it is not, as—